The Endless Forest by Sara Donati

barefoot. Children were squalling in unison, confused and frightened. Michael Yarnell—the most fidgety student in Daniel’s classroom—was running with a hen under each arm.
    The sound of the water crashing along the valley floor was deafening.
    Daniel pulled up hard and reached down to lift Jed MacGarrity up behind him on the saddle. The old man weighed next to nothing, but his whole thin body was alive with excitement.
    “You just saved my sorry hide,” he shouted into Daniel’s ear.
    “Don’t make me regret it!” Daniel shouted back and Jed let out a squawking, terrified laugh.
    A crowd had gathered in front of the Red Dog, it seemed because everyone believed the water would not come so far uphill. Daniel hoped they were right. He pulled up there to pass Jed over to the care of his daughter Jane, who broke into noisy tears at the sight of him. No one else took any notice. Every one of them was staring down toward the lake, expressions curiously slack but for the eyes that scanned the scene, back and forth. Daniel turned to watch.
    The wall of water came on with an almost regal slowness, roaring like a charging bear. Whole trees and boulders and huge clumps of ice tumbled before it. The bridge broke in two and disappeared into the churning waters.
    Whole buildings were lost in a heartbeat. Ice flew through the air in chunks, like dried corn left too close to the fire. A piece as big as a door flew hundreds of feet through the air and hit a bawling cow. Later Daniel would tell himself that he had only imagined the sound of the cow’s spine cracking. Then the animal was gone too, sucked into the melee.
    Around him many voices were raised in prayer. Others shouted to each other the things they were seeing but didn’t want to believe. Couldn’t believe, until they saw the truth of it all in the faces of neighbors.
    “Hast thou seen Friend Amos? What about the Crispins?”
    “I fear Grandmother May didn’t get to safety in time.”
    The crowd had doubled and continued to grow as people staggered in, many of them soaked and muddy, some bloody. Daniel wondered where Hannah was. For a moment panic overtook him and then he remembered she had gone to a birthing at the Rountrees, farther up the hillside. Surely the flood waters couldn’t reach that far. Surely not.
    That thought was still in his head when Lincoln Coleman came galloping up shouting for Becca. When she turned, he tossed a screaming, thrashing infant into her arms, wheeled about and was off again.
    Daniel came out of his daze. He turned Florida and kicked her to a gallop. Ethan passed him going the other way, two white-faced children crowded together before him.
    The first group Luke came across was Maria Oxley with her children. Her left arm hung at an unnatural angle, but she had one child on her back and another one on her right arm. She looked close to collapsing. Daniel pulled up beside her, took the reins in his teeth and leaned down with his good right arm to grab hands and pull the bigger children up, one behind and one before him. Maria passed the babies up for the older children to hold and then sat down just where she was. The children were screaming, and his bad arm was screaming, and the earth itself seemed to be screaming.
    Callie Wilde came around a corner, mud-covered and barefooted. She had a bulging sack over one shoulder and her expression was murderous. Furious with God himself, and ready to do battle. Her orchards were right on the river. Daniel had a brief image of her apple trees popping out of the ground one by one.
    She shouted, “Go ahead. I’ll bring Maria along.”
    A man might hesitate at such a moment, knowing full well that if things took a bad turn, these two women would be dead within the quarter hour. But Daniel had been well trained, and he would not allow himself such weakness. He kicked Florida hard, pulled her head around and galloped away, hung about with wailing children who stank of piss and vomit and